When I first read Rebecca Solnit’s essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” I was reminded of an evening more than 20 years before, when I was studying abroad in Oxford. Another student had brought me along ...

In April of this year, an interviewer asked Claire Messud a silly question about Nora Eldridge, the complex and prickly protagonist of Messud’s new novel The Woman Upstairs: would Messud want to be ...